Stop Whining!

Computers haven’t gotten much faster the last few years. It doesn’t look like they’re going to get a whole lot faster for most purposes the next few years, either.

Yes, the CPU makers have real problems; I know that all too well. However, no one else seems willing to pick up the ball and run with it.

Whenever programmers open their mouths these days, it seems like all they do is whine about their multithreaded fate. For once, the burden is on them to get their programs running faster, rather than let Intel or AMD do it for them, and what are they doing?

Are they saying, “We look forward to the challenge,” or show enthusiasm about new opportunities? I’ve seen little of that. No, instead I see moaning and groaning because the old dogs will have to learn some new tricks.

I’m not trying to minimize the difficulties; I’m complaining about the attitude. It sounds more like politicians from a certain waterlogged place talking than Geek Valhalla.

Even some of the hardware people are getting into the act, saying that more cores rather than faster cores will bottleneck their video cards.

Well, gee, isn’t that too bad! Guess you’d better go out of business.

That’s what it boils down to: Adapt or die. The world is going to change to multicores, multithreading for all but the mundane stuff; probably change for good. If you don’t do it, somebody else will, and soon after that, you’ll become a trivia question.

You know, it’s very unbecoming of geek gods to gripe so greatly. Makes them seem all too . . . human.

Perhaps more importantly for the overall industry, how can one expect mere enthusiasts to run out and buy these technologies when those who’ll have to make it go have such a “can’t do” attitude?

If the hardware doesn’t get much better, and the programming doesn’t get much better, why buy?

For all intents and purposes, that’s what an email sent by Intel’s CEO Craig Barrett to Intel employees said. I wonder if he sent a copy to himself. He should have (along with the rest of his executive officers). The last few months, just about everything seems to have gone… Read More

This Isn’t Intel Perhaps some of us have been lulled by the old Intel pattern of all CPUs being pretty much the same when it came to maximum speed. So some of us are waiting until a TBird gets to $150 or less, and figure they’ve outwitted the system. Unfortunately,… Read More